MY NAME IS OONA Gunvor Nelson
...MY NAME IS OONA Gunvor Nelson
1969. 16 mm, 10 min.
Gunvor Nelson’s career began in the 1960s in the dynamic Bay Area in California. Her debut film, Schmeerguntz, was created together with Dorothy Wiley in 1966. The film, whose title is a Germanised version of the Swedish word for sandwich, ‘smörgås’, humorously reveals the contrast between the feminine ideals conveyed in the media and the crass real life of most women. Today, both Schmeerguntz and her film Take Off from 1972 are classics in feminist experimental film. In the 1970s, Gunvor Nelson was a professor at the San Francisco Art Institute, where her unique filmic style came to influence many young film-makers. In the early 1990s, after more than 30 years in the USA, she returned to Sweden. She settled in Kristinehamn, where she currently lives and works.
THE ACCURSED MAZURKA Nina Fonoroff
THE ACCURSED MAZURKA Nina Fonoroff
1994 | 40 minutes | COLOR | OPT
16mm film, 24 fps
"A collage virtuoso, Fonoroff uses the enveloping sound of music from movie melodramas and gothic radio plays plus a third-person, softly spoken voice over to bind wildly diverse images: home movies, off-the-TV detritus layered opticals with colors so delicate they look hand tinted. The Accursed Mazurka is an excavation of female sexuality that loses its dangerous edge only when it shears off onto a neatly framed chronicle of therapeutic experiences." - Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
HEREIN Marjorie Keller
HEREIN Marjorie Keller
(1991) 16mm, color, sound, 35 min
Experimental filmmaker, author, activist, film scholar, and cultural worker Marjorie Keller (1950-1994) created a uniquely personal and feminist body of work for twenty years beginning in the early 1970s. Keller also served on the board of directors of the Collective for Living Cinema, was the founding editor of their journal, Motion Picture from 1984 to 1987 and was Director of the New York Filmmakers Cooperative in the late 1980s. Writer J. Hoberman called her “an unselfish champion of the avant-garde.” Her films deftly combine home movie and diary styles through a potent politicized lens. Herein (1991), Keller’s final film, charts the movement from political activism to filmmaking through the metaphor of a dwelling. An FBI film obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Emma Goldman’s autobiography, the making of films on the Lower East Side, street prostitution & drug addiction, all inflect the sense of place, space & history.
